Now I am done writing most of my class words, and I still want to tell you about my exciting trip to London, but I can't because now I'm too overwhelmed by all the coverage our graphic novel is getting.

Once more, in a violent spasm of self-promotion, here is a link to read Shake Girl, our collaborative graphic novel about the phenomenon of acid attacks against women in Cambodia.

It is extremely surreal seeing a bunch of complete strangers commenting on something I helped create. Some of the comments have been really mean, but those mostly just came from dumb people going, "TEH COMIX R STOOPID!" I don't really care about those people's opinions. Someone had a criticism about the ending being too optimistic, but I was okay with that because I agree with that criticism (my first [very] rough draft of the script was rejected by most of the rest of the class, one of the reasons being that it was too pessimistic).

But there have been so many positive comments pouring in! It is really gratifying to have people say that the story is compelling and the art is pretty and stuff, but what's really amazing is the people who are saying that their eyes have been opened to an issue they didn't know about before. Like this person and this person. We are even on Cambodia.org (which makes me very retroactively happy that I only used my last initial and ensures that I will never travel to Cambodia for fear of detainment and life imprisonment by the top government officials indicted in our book). We're, like, making a difference in the world! That is crazy times, you guys!

There are two moment that have really stood out as my favorites, though.

The first is the comment on our BoingBoing blurb from someone who says they didn't want to read it because they were sure we'd be all racist, but then they did read it and thought we handled it very well. This was a huge concern of ours during the making of this book; we tried to talk to as many people with firsthand experience of Cambodian culture as we could, and I know that I personally spent a lot of time going over all the dialogue and editing anything that sounded the least bit pidgin-y or Orientalist. To know that we achieved that goal is immensely gratifying.

The second is finding via Google a message board where the real-life basis for one of our characters (the half-brother) is a regular poster. Someone posted a link to Shake Girl, and then our character just basically pops up and is all, "Yeah, that's me. I'm in that book." I don't think that the experience of a character from your book discussing your book is one that happens very often, and I am enjoying the hell out of it.